Will Gmail Get Google Reader-Like Trends?
If you're a Google Reader user, no doubt you've taken a look at your Google Reader trends. The trends feature of Reader is an invaluable service that shows you which feeds you read, share, star, and email. It also provides stats on your subscriptions themselves, showing which ones are frequently updated, inactive, or the most obscure. Bar charts show items read by day, time of day, and time of week, and a tag cloud lets you find items by keyword. With all this data within easy reach, Google Reader Trends provides insight into your feed reading habits which you can then use help you to improve your feeding reading activities as well as the way you categorize your feeds and more.
But Google Reader isn't the only web app that could use a feature like this. If we could pick any other Google service to provide an analysis of our habits, it would certainly be Gmail. But could it be that Trends for Gmail is already underway?
Mail Trends
A recent post by Ed Kohler pointed us to a project under development for this very purpose. The project, called simply "Mail Trends," was mentioned on Mihai Parparita's personal blog back in March. (Parparita is a Google employee who had helped to build Google Reader itself.) Since Gmail doesn't have an official API, Mail Trends instead uses Gmail's IMAP support to pull the message headers and analyze them in order to extrapolate the data. Mail Trends can generate tables, graphs and distributions based on time of day, senders, recipients, mailing lists, etc. You can see an example of what it can output here where Parparita ran it on a piece of the Enron Email Dataset.
The project, currently hosted at Google Code, offers the code available for download, but, unfortunately to run it over your own email, you have to do geeky programmer things like downloading something called Cheetah and mess around with a command prompt. There is not an executable file for either Mac or PC. (Lifehacker has a step-by-step guide to installation if you want to go this route, though).
We Need Mail Trends!
Outlook users already have an add-in called Xobni (our coverage) which provides a look at email trends among other things, so why not Gmail?
Although Mail Trends is clearly a personal project, we wonder if there's any chance of seeing it show up one day in Gmail's Labs section. Labs, the area under Gmail's Settings that introduces experimental features seems the ideal place to debut the trends technology...at least until it's perfected.
We contacted Parparita to see if there was any chance of that ever happening, but he never responded.
Comments
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I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
Posted by: Writer Dad | August 22, 2008 7:55 AM
I read yesterday that Xobni is working on something like this for G-Mail.
Posted by: levinsontodd | August 22, 2008 8:06 AM
thanks
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Posted by: hafriyat | August 22, 2008 8:14 AM
No.
We don't need mail trends. At least not before the following things first:
1. Some kind of task lisk embedded in Gmail. Got a message that needs to be a task? Easily add it to the task list.
2. Browse mail by person or mail domain. I want to view all the mail from my @readwriteweb.com domain. Or all the mail from sperez@readwriteweb.com.
When stuff like that gets added, then the trends are a nice thing to have, that will tell you how much mail you sent or received from specific people. Great info for a cocktail party, but not for day to day work.
Posted by: Ericson Smith | August 22, 2008 8:51 AM
Thanks for this info..
I think it might be NO!.
Just look into my blogs friend..dvishnu.com i am a 14 years bloger!
Posted by: Vishnu | August 22, 2008 8:54 AM
What is way more interesting than Trends is what Google has done with Google Reader and Scoble predicted it in 2006.
You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and here’s the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.
Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.
What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.
The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.
Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers can’t change your title tag.
After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=136
It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.
If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.
Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.
One thing I have not quite figured out is if using FeedBurner now hurts you since the links point at the FeedBurner redirect rather than your site like a WordPress feed does.
Posted by: Chris Lang | August 22, 2008 8:55 AM
thank you
Posted by: dantel | August 22, 2008 8:56 AM
Another one nonsense from Google. :( I don't like it.
Posted by: Antony | August 23, 2008 9:24 AM